A Message to IETFers

The national police department of Japan reported on March 26th regarding the number of killed people by the earthquake and tsunami as 10,489 and also reported that 16,621 people are not yet found. Thus the total number of lost people is expected to be 27,000 or more. This is certainly a tragedy.

IETFers, we sincerely appreciate all of your encouraging messages and sympathies for this tragic and difficult time for us. Also, you are giving us a tremendous amount of support and donations to help the damaged area and the people there. We, as the Internet engineers in Japan have been working with you friends from the IETF community and the products of your industries to deliver the maximum help.

As I reported in <http://msg.wide.ad.jp/> and elsewhere the Internet helped people from the first moment to confirm the safety of family members and friends even when electric power had failed and voice phones were strictly controlled.

The Internet community in Japan has been working to open the data generated from the official sources properly to everyone. An example can be seen as <http://eq.wide.ad.jp/index_en.html>.

Note that we want to address the lack of information for non-Japanese language speakers especially those located in Japan.

Unfortunately, the initial situation of the nuclear power plants were like ‘Jaws’ situation; some did not agree to open the information to the public promptly. We certainly would like to contribute to the open access of the critical information for the diversity of people around the world.

We are having a rotational scheduled regional power down in Tokyo and its connecting prefectures. This situation is not expected to be better soon, rather, even worse when summer comes. The life of us here is very hard, especially to keep the servers and disks up and running for services of the Internet during the power failure period.

Some of us from Japan might have to cancel our participation in the IETF this time, like myself. But we certainly wish the best discussion for the IETF process. We continue to work for recovering from this tragic disaster as experts of the technologies IETF has developed.

Thanks for the Internet, a packet switching network and its successful deployment to cover the maximum population even for this disaster occasion, and thank all of you IETFers again for your sympathies and friendship to Japan.